Making Tony Singh’s Peanut Butter Chicken Thighs | Baking Bad

In the previous episode of Baking Bad, we stumbled our way to triumph baking John Whaite’s top notch Mojito Cake. So this time it seemed like we should step things up a gear; rather than just cooking one thing between us, we’d each do our own dish. The source of our inspiration this time? TASTY, the absolutely stunning new book from Tony Singh, one of The Incredible Spice Men from BBC Two.

Over the next few days, we’ll be showing you the 3 dishes we cooked from the book. First up, here’s Tom with the downright awesome peanut butter chicken thighs with steamed rice…

The ingredients
A pretty varied list of stuff, but nothing too extravagant and you should be able to pick up all the ingredients easily enough. I mean, you might not be able to get Szechuan peppercorns at your local 24-hour garage, but most big supermarkets should deliver the goods. Who knew you could add a bag of dry-roasted peanuts to a dish and it taste amazing? Surely the most versatile of pub snacks.

The equipmentYou just need a wok to cook it all in, and couple of bowls for mixing the sauce and the marinade, but nothing too crazy. This isn’t Heston, this is proper food.

The peanut butter sauce (left) and the chicken thighs in the delicious soy and sesame oil marinade (right). And a little bit of my washing machine.

The method

Flicking through Tasty, I’d spied this recipe early on as the photos look incredible, but I’d been wary that it might be quite complicated. However, when you look through properly it’s actually pretty straightforward. Prepare your marinade and peanut butter sauce, slap the marinated chicken in a sizzling hot wok with some chillies, garlic and ginger and stir fry until cooked, chuck in your sauce and a few other spices, give it a few minutes and then serve with steamed rice and chopped spring onions. Lovely stuff.

The results

Put it this way, this will now be a regular dish in my arsenal of ‘impressive dishes’ (I’m now up to 6). From the moment the chicken hit the wok I knew this would be good as it smelt amazing, but I was genuinely blown away by how good this tasted. It was salty, sweet and crunchy all at once, and all the flavours worked so well together. I hope this photo does it some justice…

Conclusion

Round 1 of ‘Singh For Your Supper’ was a complete success. This dish is quick, easy to make, and looks and tastes delicious. Well done Tony, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.

Next up…

It’s veggie time tomorrow, as Rich takes on the baked sweet potato curry. He’s gonna have to work damn hard to match this though…

TASTY by Tony Singh is published Thursday 22nd May. It’s an absolute cracker of a book. Order yourself a copy here and get cooking.